Bug#1133070: Let scp -r print directory names (or some other form of an overall progress indicator)

"Albert Nash" <[email protected]> Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:45:14 +0000
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.ssh
Message-ID <a548d3701ad2dd0e403aefcb75e66ec1__11545.3938649566$1775756848$gmane$org@mail.rambler.ru>
Package: openssh-client
Version: 1:10.0p1-7+deb13u1
Severity: wishlist
While recursively copying from a remote computer via, say,
scp -rp user@remote_host:./directory .
, we see file names printed, but not subdirectory names. This leads the user to guess how much is done and how much is left in total. It gets worse if there are many files with identical names living in different subdirectories. A typical example is copying huge .thunderbird folders with many e-mail accounts—then the user sees pages of similar entries such as
INBOX
DraftBox.msf
msgFilterRules.dat
…
(with sizes) for hours all over again, without knowing which of the subdirectories these files belong to, which subdirectories have already been copied, and which are still left.
I suggest that the full known suffixes get printed (by default or when the switch "-v" is provided); in the above example, these would be
.thunderbird/8_letters_and_digits.default-default/ImapMail/imap.servername.com/INBOX
.thunderbird/8_letters_and_digits.default-default/ImapMail/imap.servername.com/DraftBox.msf
.thunderbird/8_letters_and_digits.default-default/ImapMail/imap.servername.com/msgFilterRules.dat
…
Note that the switch "-v" currently doesn't do this, and the manpage of scp is of no help here.
Gratefully!